Flowers For Socrates

Czesław Miłosz (1911-2004) was born on June 30 in Šeteniai, Lithuania, the son of a Polish civil engineer, at a time of great upheaval. He became a Polish-American poet, prose writer, translator, and diplomat, regarded as one of the great poets of the 20th century, and won the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Milosz was in Warsaw when it was bombarded as part of the German invasion of Poland in September 1939, and he joined the underground resistance. In August 1944, he was captured and held in a prisoner transit camp; he was later rescued by a Catholic nun—a stranger to him—who pleaded with the Germans on his behalf. From 1945 to 1951, Miłosz served as a cultural attaché for the newly formed People’s Republic of Poland. He moved from New York City to Washington, D.C., and finally to Paris, organizing and promoting Polish cultural occasions such as musical concerts, art exhibitions, and literary and cinematic events. Although he was a representative of Poland, which had become a Soviet satellite country behind the Iron Curtain, he was not a member of any communist party.

After his refusal to live in Poland or continue working for the Polish regime, he spent most of the 1950s in France, which granted him asylum.  In 1960, Miłosz was offered a position as a visiting lecturer at the University of California at Berkeley. He had been Stateless from 1951 until he became an American citizen in 1970. Miłosz died in Kraków, Poland, in 2004.

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To read “A Song on the End of the World” by Czeslaw Milosz, click

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